Gilbert Wakefield,second wrangler in 1776,published an edition of Lucretius,and was a man of great ability and energy.Herbert Marsh,second wrangler in 1779,was divinity professor from 18O7,and was the first English writer to introduce some knowledge of the early stages of German criticism.Porson,the greatest Greek scholar of his time,became professor in 1790;Malthus,ninth wrangler in 1788,who was to make a permanent mark upon political economy,became fellow of Jesus College in 1793.Waring,senior wrangler in 1757,Vince,senior wrangler in 1775,and Wollaston,senior wrangler in 1783,were also professors and mathematicians of reputation.Towards the end of the century ten professors were lecturing.(24)A large number were not lecturing,though Milner was good enough to be 'accessible to students.'Paley and Watson had been led off into the path of ecclesiastical preferment.Marsh too became a bishop in 1816.There was no place for such talents as those of Malthus,who ultimately became professor at Haileybury.Wakefield had the misfortune of not being able to cover his heterodoxy with the conventional formula.
Porson suffered from the same cause,and from less respectable weaknesses;but it seems that the university had no demand for services of the great scholar,and he did nothing for his ￡40a year.Milner was occupied in managing the university in the interests of Pitt and Protestantism,and in waging war against Jacobins and intruders.There was no lack of ability;but there was no inducement to any intellectual activity for its own sake;and there were abundant temptations for any man of energy to diverge to the career which offered more intelligible rewards.
The universities in fact supplied the demand which was actually operative.
They provided the average clergyman with a degree;they expected the son of the country-gentleman or successful lawyer to acquire the traditional culture of his class,and to spend three or four years pleasantly,or even,if he chose,industriously.But there was no such thing as a learned society,interested in the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake,and applauding the devotion of life to its extension or discussion.The men of the time who contributed to the progress of science owed little or nothing to the universities,and were rather volunteers from without,impelled by their own idiosyncrasies.Among the scientific leaders,for example,Joseph Black (1728-1799)was a Scottish professor.Priestley (1733-1804)a dissenting minister;Cavendish (1731-1810)an aristocratic recluse,who,though he studied at Cambridge,never graduated;Watt (1736-1819)a practical mechanician;and Dalton (1766-1844)a Quaker schoolmaster.John Hunter (1728-1793)was one of the energetic Scots who forced their way to fame without help from English universities.The cultivation of the natural sciences was only beginning to take root;and the soil,which it found congenial,was not that of the great learned institutions,which held to their old traditional studies.
I may,then,sum up the result in a few words.The church had once claimed to be an entirely independent body,possessing a supernatural authority,with an organisation sanctioned by supernatural powers,and entitled to lay down the doctrines which gave the final theory of life.Theology was the queen of the sciences and theologians the interpreters of the first principles of all knowledge and conduct.The church of England,on the other hand,at our period had entirely ceased to be independent:it was bound hand and foot by acts of parliament:there was no ecclesiastical organ capable of shaking in its name,altering its laws or defining its tenets:it was an aggregate of offices the appointment to which was in the hands either of the political ministers or of the lay members of the ruling class.It was in reality simply a part of the ruling class told off to perform divine services:to maintain order and respectability and the traditional morality.It had no distinctive philosophy or theology,for the articles of belief represented simply a compromise;an attempt to retain as much of the old as was practicable and yet to admit as much of the new as was made desirable by political considerations.It was the boast of its more liberal members that they were not tied down to any definite dogmatic system;but could have a free hand so long as they did not wantonly come into conflict with some of the legal formulae laid down in a previous generation.The actual teaching showed the effects of the system.It had been easy to introduce a considerable leaven of the rationalism which suited the lay mind;to explain away the mysterious doctrines upon which an independent church had insisted as manifestations of its spiritual privileges,but which were regarded with indifference or contempt by the educated laity now become independent.The priest had been disarmed and had to suit his teaching to the taste of his patrons and congregations.The divines of the eighteenth century had,as they boasted,confuted the deists;but it was mainly by showing that they could be deists in all but the name.The dissenters,less hampered by legal formulae,had drifted towards Unitarianism.